Is your mortgage tax deductible?

Blog by Ian Watt | April 20th, 2007

Is your mortgage tax deductible?

FRASER SMITH is a financial strategist residing in Victoria, British Columbia. He has pioneered The Smith Manoeuvre, a ground-breaking, legal strategy that enables ordinary Canadian homeowners to make their mortgages tax deductible in a simple, elegant, and affordable way. He released his strategy Canada-wide in December of 2002, in his new book entitled The Smith Manoeuvre (through Trafford Publishing). For over twenty years, until his retirement in 2002, Smith provided financial planning and tax advice to individuals and families from all walks of life. In 1981, Smith and partners founded the Granville West Group, a prominent financial services entity in Vancouver. In 1991, Fraser went on to form the Smith Consulting Group and KittyHawk Securities, and practiced financial planning until 2002. As a financial planning strategist, Smith saw that many of Canada's wealthier citizens, with the assistance of expensive tax accountants and lawyers, were deducting the interest on their house mortgage loans. Smith also knew that because of complexity and cost, these kinds of practices were not available to Canadians of average means - the other 90% of the population. He also saw that too many Canadians were waiting until their mortgages were paid off before they started to build an investment portfolio, missing out on years of compounding interest, and putting themselves in the position of being house rich and cash poor in retirement. With this in mind, Fraser set out to learn about the rules of tax deductibility. He already knew that wealthy Canadians were manoeuvering their debt and taxes to deduct their mortgage interest, and build investments. He was certain those tax tools could also be employed in some way by mortgage holders of modest means, and he was right. After studying Canada's tax rules extensively, and working closely with the highly-regarded VanCity, Fraser developed a new, simple, and powerful strategy that extends the tax advantages of the wealthy to Canadians of average means in an affordable, elegant, and legal way. In a nutshell, The Smith Manoeuvre employs refined debt conversion techniques to transform mortgage interest into tax deductions. The method has a remarkable snowball effect that generates large and growing annual tax refunds, and enables the homeowner to knock years off the life of a mortgage and build an impressive financial portfolio at the same time. It is the most efficient way for families to raise the resources they need to secure both their house and income in retirement. Since then, Fraser along with his associates and several financial institutions, have arranged for hundreds of ordinary Canadian families to make their mortgages tax deductible, and increase their net worth significantly. The Smith Manoeuvre uses the legal tools of the CRA and Canadian Financial institutions. It has been reviewed by Revenue Canada staff, and endorsed by respected financial experts and economists, investment planners, and lenders. Upon retirement from the financial planning business in late 2002, Smith decided to write his book to extend the benefits of The Smith Manoeuvre to all Canadians with mortgages. It is his gift to over-taxed, hard-working Canadians.